Editing arbitrarily deforming surface animations

Deforming surfaces, such as cloth, can be generated through physical simulation, morphing, and even video capture. Such data is currently very difficult to alter after the generation process is complete, and data generated for one purpose generally cannot be adapted to other uses. Such adaptation would be extremely useful, however. Being able to take cloth captured from a flapping flag and attach it to a character to make a cape, or enhance the wrinkles on a simulated garment, would greatly enhance the usability and re-usability of deforming surface data. In addition, it is often necessary to cleanup or "tweak" simulation results. Doing this by editing each frame individually is a very time consuming and tedious process. Extensive research has investigated how to edit and re-use skeletal motion capture data, but very little has addressed completely non-rigid deforming surfaces. We have developed a novel method that now makes it easy to edit such arbitrary deforming surfaces. Our system enables global signal processing, direct manipulation, multiresolution embossing, and constraint editing on arbitrarily deforming surfaces, such as simulated cloth, motion-captured cloth, morphs, and other animations. The foundation of our method is a novel time-varying multiresolution transform, which adapts to the changing geometry of the surface in a temporally coherent manner.